All Perspectives

It has been a week since the city of Mumbai was held hostage by gun toting youngsters. A week since the Indian intelligence agencies exposed their inadequacies for the whole world to see.  A week since ten men brought an entire city with a population of  fifteen million to its knees.

But this post is not to lament that. Nor is it my aim to bemoan the politicians whose crisis management skills mainly consisted of visiting the attacked sites  (after the terrorists were subdued) in the latest “Armani” (which of course needed to be changed every hour for the photo ops) and who needed public anger to rouse them to a sense of their moral responsibility.  No, this post is to discuss the mindset of people who would show no mercy even to a child and how to deal with them.

The philosopher Santayana once said “Those Who Forget History Are Doomed to Repeat It”.  So let us look at these terrorist attacks from a historical context.

A study of terrorist activities in the last decade shows that the attacks are usually aimed towards the following.

• Monetary gains
• Political gains
• Ideological/religious beliefs

Let us consider the cases of the 9/11 attacks, the Karachi Marriott hotel attack, the Madrid train bombings and the Mumbai terror attacks of last week. All these attacks have a few things in common:

• No ransom was demanded.
• No noticeable political demands (such of release of political prisoners, rollback of particular pieces of legislation etc.) were made. The targets were not specifically military or political personnel. (And there is nothing to be gained politically in shooting people randomly in a railway station or supermarket).
• The majority of the victims were innocent and defenseless people (travelers/tourists, business people etc).

Were these attacks simply to instill fear in the enemy? But who is the enemy here? The answer to this lies in the profile of the attackers and the victims:

• The perpetrators were young muslim males subscribing to a particularly fundamentalist branch of Islam and were from muslim nations that mostly have good relations with the West at the government level (Saudi Arabia, Pakistan etc.). The targets were a diverse group mostly non muslim (Christians, jews, hindus etc.) or muslims considered as heretics  (apostates, reformers, ahmadiyas, shias and those cultivating a friendly relationship with non muslims ).

So now without any further ado and without any attempt to fool ourselves or be politically correct, let us address the cause. I charge that the ideology of Islam is directly responsible for the activities of these terrorists.

Now,  many will claim that this is not so and that the terrorists are simply subverting the message of Islam which is peaceful. I submit that this is not true. Islam from its inception has been military, conquering and fascistic in nature.   The word “Islam” means submission not peace.  The quran makes it very clear that Islam is to be established all over the world and the enemies of Islam killed.  Over time attempts to reform the religion by forward thinking muslims have met with resistance and failure.

Survival is the natural instinct of human beings and is deeply ingrained in our nature. A nineteen year old does not become a suicide soldier for a religion without a steady diet of religious concepts intended to brainwash him.  A twenty year old will not simply throw away his life if he did not believe that he will receive a great reward for such an act.  These boys were  neither “misguided” nor did they “misunderstand”  Islam. They followed Islam in its pristine form.  The ambushes, skirmishes and wars detailed in Islamic texts on the life of Mohammad, founder of Islam,   provides the blueprint for the activities of these youngsters fifteen centuries later. Unless nations rise up to the realization of the true danger such fascistic and totalitarian ideologies pose to the free world, we will continue to face more such attacks.

You may say that all religions have violent passages embedded in their texts. You would be right in saying so. The only difference is that most other religions have evolved and violent passages are now only taken in a historical or allegorical context. The reason why Islam has not evolved is that muslims are extolled to follow the word of the quran and the life of their prophet quite literally.  As a result, reform minded muslims  are routinely murdered by the hardcore followers.  Those who have no hesitation in murdering their own kin for their beliefs will have no compunction about attacking us who refuse to capitulate. Therefore we have no choice but to fight  militant Islam militarily, economically and philosophically until it evolves into a more benign form or is completely subdued and defeated. Our own survival depends upon it.

What intelligence agencies around the world have to consider and prepare for is that the Mumbai attacks may have simply been a test run for  a future  operation of a grander scale.  It is important for ordinary people to remain alert and not simply depend upon armies and intelligence agencies to protect them. The way for evil to win is for a few good people to remain silent and afraid.  Let us therefore remain forever vigilant and ready.